How did I forget?
**WARNING: Contains traces of RANT**
My parents live next door to a C of E church. The vicar who was in residence throughout the time I was growing up there was the complete opposite to the peaceful ideal of "Love thy neighbour."

He has a sign in his window which reads "Today is the vicar's day off." I presumed this was just for Saturdays initially, but when I started doing a local paper round I noticed that sign seemed to be there almost every day.

When I was about...oh, 8 or 9, a window was broken on the church steeple. He knocked on the door to ask my mother if I had kicked a football through it. From the height of this window, and the steep angle it made with our garden, I think even Roberto Fucking Carlos would have struggled, let alone the lanky kid who was always picked last when the boys were playing football in the playground.

A little more consideration would have been nice when he cleaned out the church gutters. He could have taken care to collect all the gunk in a bucket; instead he just casually shovelled it out and let it splatter all over the side of our house.

My father had a maple tree which had apparently grown from a seed he'd picked up in Kew Gardens. Quite an impressive specimen it was too by the time I was about 16. We came back from a holiday that summer to find that someone had 'ringed' it. That is, they'd tied a piece of wire round the tree such that it cut into the bark and cut off the tree's xylem. And the piece of wire had been embedded a couple of feet above the wall that separated our gardens. When confronted, the pillock said "Oh, well, we do get a lot of funny people hanging around the church*, I'm sure the kids said they saw someone on the garden wall a couple of weeks ago."

There's probably more, but I'm ranting now. Just to finish, I remember him letting a homeless chap live in the church basement. I don't know how much he knew about this guy to start with, but I found out years later that this homeless guy had been writing letters to the girls who went to play round the churchyard. The vicar's response to this revelation?
"Oh, perhaps it's time he moved on."

Did I say bad neighbour? I think "sanctimonious cockdonkey of the highest order" would be more accurate.

*_{Yeah, your congregation, mate...}
(LongJohnBaldry, Fri 5 Feb 2010, 12:18, Reply)